Cooper, D. E. (1999). Existentialism: A Reconstruction.

(Second
ed.). Blackwell Publishing. pp. 21-37.

2
Philosophy and Alienation

Battling against Bewitchment

In this chapter I shall be suggesting that there is a truth, though not perhaps the
one intended, in the popular idea that existentialism is a practical philosophy,
il
l
I
one to be 'lived'. The conception of a philosophy as something to live, and a
philosopher as somebody who lives one, is venerable. For many Socrates is the
philosopher, not because of theories he taught, but because of his enquiring,
honest, courageous life. The Daoist sage is not a man who simply knows
things, but a hsien (man of the mountains) who manifests his knowledge
through renunciation of social and worldly ambitions.
Underlying such conceptions is the thought that there are kinds of under-
standing which transform a person's stance towards reality, and hence his life.
How he lives, or is, thereby becomes a test of what he knows. (The person
who escapes from the cave and 'sees' the 'Form of the Good' is metamor-
phosed, which is why, Plato says, it will be almost impossible to get him to
return to the cave and lead others out of it.) I shall argue that the Existentialist
aims at an understanding of this kind, and for the sake of the transformation it
effects. Whether existentialism is a 'practical' philosophy in the stronger
sense of offering concrete guidance on how people ought to behave;
whether, if you like, it issues in an ethic - these are questions I postpone
until chapter 10.
I shall approach the matter from what might seem an unlikely direction.
Followers of the later Wittgenstein sometimes like to describe philosophy as a
therapy, even as a relative of psychoanalysis. They are inspired in this by such
well-known remarks of Wittgenstein's as 'philosophy is a battle against the
bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language' and 'a philosophical
problem has the form "I don't know my way about."' Philosophy, to cite his
II I
, I
1I
22 Philosophy and Alienation
famous analogy, must endeavour to show the fly out of the bottle in which it is
1
trapped. The idea, it seems, is this: language, when it functions in normal
communication, is perfectly 'in order' as it is. But when it is allowed to 'go on
holiday', and is unmoored from its usual functions, language can seduce us into
a whole array of misconceptions, for example, the illusion that all nouns, even
ones like 'thought' and 'meaning', must stand for thing-like entities of however
mysterious a kind.
Wittgenstcin was not, in one sense, offering any prescription for living, for
he thought that most people would sensibly avoid the questions that render
them liable to the seductions and bewitchments oflanguage. Better to work as
a shop-assistant, was his advice to one aspiring philosopher. Still, for those who
fail to heed such advice, philosophy should not be the task of providing new
knowledge, of constructing large theories, nor even of solving substantial
questions. These are the tasks of science. Philosophy, rather, should be an
activity through which the victim of bewitchment helps himself escape from
the fly-bottle, or appease the disquiet into which he has fallen. The right-
minded philosopher is distinguished by a certain stance towards language, and
I
,, his success is measured by the mental peace he attains as a result of this
'therapy'.
Now by far the most important bewitchments against which Wittgenstein
thinks we must battle are those which lead us to postulate two fictitious,
complementary realms: first, that of the 'inner', 'private' mental life in which
invisible processes of meaning, desiring, thinking, etc. are conducted; second,
an 'objective', 'transcendent' realm of things and events possessed of 'essences'
which are quite independent of our particular conceptual schemes, 'language-
games' and 'tonns of life'. Such bewitchments produce dualisms like those of
inner versus outer, mind versus body, language versus reality, private versus
public, or word versus essence.
It is of great interest that it is against bewitchments of just this kind that the
sages of several very ancient traditions are also portrayed as struggling.
1,1
The Daoist, tor example, recognizes both the relativity to human thought of
all the properties we purport to discover in the world, and that the 'I', since it
requires the presence of the 'He', cannot be a discrete psychic entity like a
2
soul. Comparisons like this prompt the thought that the battle is not simply to
relieve intellectual cramps, but to remedy a whole distorted stance towards the
relation between man and world - one which inclines our ambitions, our
treatment of other people, our relationship to God, our very lives in fact, in
certain directions.
The further thought is then suggested that the deepest urge to philosophy
may be the need to overcome, dissolve, or come to terms with the dualistic
thinking which informs that stance. Neither puzzlement nor awe, neither a
thirst for knowledge nor a craving for clarity, has been the abiding inspiration
Philosophy and Alienation 23
for philosophy. Rather, this has been the perpetual threat posed by the sense
that men are hopelessly alienated from their world.
This thought must sound odd to the contemporary student of philosophy.
The subject is usually introduced to him through discussion of Descartes'
doubts about the material world, the validity of mathematics and so on.
Other writers are then brought in by locating them in the debate about
scepticism. Do Plato's Forms serve as objects of absolutely _certain knowledge?
Does Berkeley's 'esse est percipi' guarantee the ex1stence of tables and trees by
e uating them with our 'sense-data'? Did Kant establish that the very possibil-
of experience requires physical objects and causal laws? In short, the
contemporary student must gain the impression that ph1losophy revolves
primarily around 'the problem of knowledge'. The. topic of alienation will
then sound a fairly marginal one, the province of onental exot1c1sm or Teu-
tonic brooding.
1 can hardly intend, in a few paragraphs, to rewrite the history of philosophy,
but 1 think that the student just described has matters the wrong way round.
The problem of knowledge perhaps owes its endurance to being just one
aspect of the larger issue of alienation. What is really disturbing in Descartes'
'methodological doubt' is not that it gets people to wonder seriously if the
world exists. Indeed, one must ask with Wittgenstein and Heidegger what it
would be like to entertain such worries. Can one even pretend to entertain
them? How could such doubts, 'idle' at best, be the well-spring of philosophy?
Descartes tries to show that my experiences could be just as they are even
though there exists no world for them to be experiences of. And what is
disturbing in this is not the worry that perhaps there really is no world, but the
sense that I am a self-enclosed realm, 'cut off in logical isolation from the
world. 3 If I could exist despite the absence of things and other people, then it
cannot be essential to my being that I have a body and am in the company of
others. Descartes' subsequent reintroduction of the material world, via a God
who would not fool us about its reality, can do nothing to restore the intimacy
between myself and my body and world which his initial arguments have
dissolved. This is especially so, given the kind of world he reintroduces: for
this is the world of science, and our ordinary image of the world as replete with
colours, sounds, meanings and beauty is relegated to a mere subjective effect of
the scientists' 'real' world. Not only is the world inessential to my being, but it
turns out to be one that I cannot comprehend. The scientist may comprehend
this 'real' world, but is in the schizoid position of experie11cing a completely
different one.
If the above account of the significance of Cartesian 'doubt' is plausible, then
We need to look again at philosophers usually construed as attempting to solve
the problem of knowledge. Perhaps even Descartes is misconstrued if read as a
genuine 'doubter'. An alternative reading would be this: Descartes was at once
llll
24 Philosophy and Alienation
convinced by the mechanistic, Galilean account of the world and perturbed by
it - for what space does that account leave for God and for the Christian idea
that the world is there, in some sense, for our sake? Descartes' main aim, perhaps,
was to re-establish that space and that idea. As he explained in a letter of 1638 to
Vatier, the only sure way to prove God's existence was to show that what is left
after the world has been 'bracketed', the cogito, could only operate as it does if
there is a God providing it with some of its thoughts (notably, that of perfec-
tion).4 In that event, the Galilean world which Descartes then reintroduces
must be something which is not only created by this God, but ordered by Him
to behave in harmony with ourselves, His creatures. This, perhaps, is the most
we can hope for by way of intimacy with the world in the age of science.
The usual way of reading the other thinkers mentioned earlier may also be
guilty of mistaken emphasis. For Plato, the Forms surely have a more signific-
ant role than to serve as items of indubitable knowledge. Being eternal and
immaterial, they are akin to the minds which come to the acquainted with
them, unlike physical objects which are alien to the nature of the soul. As Plato
puts it, the philosopher attains knowledge of the Forms 'with the facultv which
is akin to reality, and which approaches and unites with it'. 5 too,
rejects matter, not only because it would be unknowable, but because it would
be an unnecessary intwsion. If the only reality outside of our own minds and
their ideas is God, then nothing exists which is incommensurate to, or unfitting
for, the mental. Berkeley's attitude towards matter is one of indignation at
something so 'stupid' and alien to ourselves. It is 'repugnant' to suppose that
the world might exist without mind. 6 Only if it is so many 'signs' provided by
God tor 'informing, admonishing and directing' us is the world suited to
human intelligence. 7
To judge from the reception among his immediate philosophical successors
in Gernuny, Kant's dramatic contribution was not to have laid Hume's
scepticism to rest, but his postulation of a 'noumenal' reality of unknowable
'things-in-themselves' standing behind the empirical world. Kant himself
thought that the primary importance of this was moral rather than epistemo-
logical, for it secured room for free will and responsibility. (In the empirical
order, the will is, like everything else, causally determined.) For many of his
successors, though, the 'noumenal' world was not something to welcome, but
an emotional as well as an intellectual disaster. As the poet Kleist put it in a
letter to his fiancee, the effect of putting the 'real' world outside of experience
was to render 'every effort to earn a possession which follows us into the
grave ... in vain ... my single, highest goal is sunk, and I have no other.'x Kleist
was not exaggerating, for he committed suicide shortly after.
These selective remarks will not convince anyone to read the history of the
subject in a new way, but they support the thought that a perennial concern of
Philosophy and Alienation 25
philosophy has been to confront an ;dienation of man trom the world which
· nee language or metaphysical specubtion may threaten. For example, the
soe ,
osing charms of materialism and idealism may reside less in their solutions
0
problem of knowledge, than in suggesting how men may be 'at one'
with the world. Either man is just one more kind of thing in nature, or nature
is itself a constituent of his consciousness.
It can hardly be denied, at any rate, that for some philosophers of the first
im ortance alienation has been the explicit focus, and I shall shortly be
tu!ing to two of these. Uctore that, it is worth remarking, tollowing
Hegel, that philosophy so considered is at once brought into immed1ate
roximity with those other great endeavours of the human spmt, rebgwn
;nd art. It is, of course, a cliche that a main inspiration fi..Jr religion is a need
for unity with 'something larger than oneself. This need is most obviomly
manifested in religions of a pantheistic hue, or in ones, like that of the
Upanishads, where the soul is identified with the principle of the cosmos. But
even where there is worship of a more personal God, the endeavour is
to envisage a hlllnanized world, one created and governed by a Being recog-
nizably like ourselves (even if, as Marx argued, the net effect is to make the
actual world more alien).
It is a cliche, too, that some of the greatest art has endeavoured to forge, or
to record, a unity between the human spirit and the world. The artist 'human-
izes' a shapeless world by lending it form, or he attunes himself to the world's
rhythms. From the anonymous poets of the Vedas to Tagore, from Theocritus
to Wordsworth and Goethe, this unity has been a salient motif of poetry. 'The
skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was
mine,' wrote the seventeenth-century poet Thomas Traherne, on behalf of
countless members of his calling. And countless painters would no doubt hope
that the following description of Van Gogh's Crows wer the Whcatjield might
also apply to their own works. It presents an 'all-absorbing essence in which at
last subject and object, part and whole, past and present, near and far, can no
longer be distinguished'. Y
This will all sound much too romantic to some cars, and it will have escaped
nobody's notice that the terminology in which I haYc so far discussed alien-
ation- 'at home with', 'separated from', etc.- is both vague and figurative. It
may be that the sense of alienation is resistant to literal, analytical definition.
Perhaps it is a sense which can, finally, be registered only through the practices
and metaphors of religion and art. But this would be a pessimistic attitude. At
the very least, alienation is a many-sided notion whose sides need to be
individually exposed. This task is of a piece with trying to indicate the various
respects in which alienation is held to be so important to 'overcome' or, at any
come to terms with. The best way to approach these tasks is by consider-
mg the views of two writers, He gel and Marx, who explicitly undertook them.
 26 Philosophy and Alienation
This will also put us in a position of being able to compare and contrast the
Existentialist's treatment of the matter.
Hegel and Marx
For He gel, alienation is not so much the central issue of philosophy as the o11ly
one, with the sole test of a philosophy being its ability to 'overcome' alien-
ation. Philosophy aims to ensure that 'everything foreign has vanished and
Geist [mind, spirit] is ... at home with itself.' 10 But Hegel has still more startling
claims to make.
The first is that alienation is the fundamental feature of consciousness
throughout its history - one which begins with Geist's 'separation from itself,
its opposing itself to the world of Nature. Its subsequent history is that of
further 'withdrawal out of its happy natural life, into the night of self-
consciousness'; followed by the long attempt to 'reconstmct ... the reality ...
11
from which it has been separated'. More than this, though, history itself is
'the development of Geist in time', and that development is the 'endless labour'
of Geist to overcome its self-alienation. 12 History's parade of civilizations,
'world-historical' individuals, religions and so on, is that of the 'vehicles'
commandeered by Geist in its stmggle to recapture a lost unity with Nature.
Philosophy, finally, does not merely discuss alienation; it is a peculiarly
significant manifestation of it. It is 'the spirit of the age ... as present to itself
in thought' and, as such, must reflect Geist's struggles against alienation, as do
religion and art. Philosophy thus ends when alienation does; when, having
once 'elevated' itself above 'immediate unity with Nature', it manages 'by the
activity of thinking to restore the unity again' . 13 In short, from the dawn of
self-consciousness the condition of Geist has been one of alienation. This
condition, in its various twists and turns, has dictated the history of civilization,
including that of philosophy, whose task is to restore a lost unity. The unity
regained, however, will not be the original 'dull', 'nai've' sort, but one which is
thought and understood, not just felt.
Hegel grounds these remarkable claims on two central propositions. First,
there is the idealist insistence that 'the Absolute is Geist.' Gods, numbers, men,
mice, stones - all these arc aspects of a single reality whose nature is spiritual or
mind-like. To suppose that reality is not like this, Hegel thinks, yields contra-
dictions. The second proposition is that Geist is an activity or process whose
goal is that of self-knowledge. Nothing, Hegcl argues, can count as mind-like
unless it is rational; and no activity is rational that is not distinguished by
reflection on, and understanding of, its own character.
From these propositions it follows that Geist only realizes its aim, self-
knowledge, when it appreciates that it is the whole of reality. It must
Philosophy and Alienation 27
'recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth', and see that there is no
'out and out other' besides itself. t.l During the whole period prior to that
recognition, consequently, Geist has laboured under a misunderstanding, for
it has supposed that heaven and earth are 'out and out other' than itself It has,
in fine, been alienated from itself, regarding as 'foreign' what are really
aspects of itself. At this point, it is worth bearing in mind the etymology
of the German word, 'En![rcmdu11g', which gets translated as 'alienation'. It
comes from :fremd' ('strange', 'foreign'), so that the translation which better
captures Hegel's notion would be 'estrangement'. Like the lover
estranged from the woman who is, if he would only realize it, 'a part of
him', so Geist is estranged from the world or Nature that, more literally for
Hegel, is a part of it.
We can now see how Hegel is able to make his startling claims about history,
philosophy and alienation. First, if the very essence of Geist is to achieve self-
knowledge, then its fundamental feature during its 'endless labours' is that so far
it has failed in this task. Just as the crucial thing about a seed is that it has not yet
'actualized' its potential as a fruit, so, Hegcl says, the cmcial thing about Geist
has been to have remained only potentially what it is essentially. Second, the
history of the world - its great civilizations and men, its religions and art-forms
- will indeed be that of alienation if it is merely the manifestation of a Geist
whose nature, we now know, is to have 'externalized' or 'estranged' itself This
historical stmggle is conducted, in part, at the self-conscious level which we
call 'philosophy'. So, finally, 'the spectacle afforded by the history of philo-
sophy' will be precisely the struggle of Geist against alienation. And philosophy
only concludes its task when, in the shape of Hcgel's system, it achieves its 'aim
to grasp the Absolute as Geist' . 15
Most people find these claims hard to digest, choking most of all on
the notion of Geist. It would be cheering, certainly, if that notion could be
'brought down to earth', and the simplest way would be to constme the word
as an over-dramatic, collective label for individual human minds or conscious-
nesses. Unfortunately this would be un£1ithful to Hegel, who frequently
contrasts Geist with the totality of human beings. On the other hand, he does
insist that Geist is no 'soul-thing' which exists independently of ourselves. It is
only 'truly actual through ... its necessary self-manifestation' in the concrete,
embodied or intellectual activities of people. 10 So while Geist cannot be
equated with human being, we can expect assertions about it to imply cor-
ollaries about ourselves. Geist can then be 'brought down to earth' by setting
aside worries about its final metaphysical status and concentrating upon these
corollaries about human beings. This is just what Hcgel himself does in The
Phenomenology of Spin't and The Philosophy of History where, at the levels of
Psychology and political history, he concerns himself with Geist's 'self-
manifestations' in human affairs.
 28 Philosophy and Alienation
It would be good, in particular, to grasp the concrete corollaries of the claim
that the history of Geist is one of alienation and the struggle to overcome it.
We want to know, too, just why alienation is so undesirable; why not only
philosophy, but religion, art and statecraft struggle to overcome it. Hegel
makes it clear that not only is the state of alienation one of misunderstanding,
but it is also 'wretched', 'unhappy' or 'uncanny'. History, he laconically
remarks, is not 'the theatre of happiness'. 17
There is, of course, a puzzle as to why Ccist ever alienated itself in the first
place. 'Brought down to earth', the point seems to be that humans will only
recognize their true place in the order of things - as privileged aspects of an
essentially spiritual reality - if they first treat that order as 'objective', outside of
themselves. Only if they do this vvill they develop the articulated understanding
of Nature which will eventually transmute into the recognition that it is not,
after all, intellit,riblc as independent of themselves. The analogy might be with
the artist Rembrandt, say, who must i1rst 'externalize' himself in self-portraits
111 order that, by looking at them," he can understand his own character. Hegel's
vinv in fact extends an ancient theological tradition according to which God
creates the world so that, through this image of Himself, he may come to know
'I
His own nature.
I! Whatever the reason, humans have come to view reality as extemal to
themselves, and their history is one of trying to correct that view. Hegcl
indicates at least tlve 'grim' aspects of alienation which, surfacing at various
points in history, induce men to overcome it.
To begin with, once men contrast themselves qua spiritual beings with
Nature, they thereby contrast-themselves with their own bodies. This is an
especially acute aspect of what He gel calls 'the unhappy consciousness', which
characterizes medieval, ascetic Christianity. Alienated from the natural world,
people think of themselves as immaterial souls. Their 'animal functions·
then become an 'embarrassment' in which 'the enemy reveals himself'.
Sensual desires pose a threat to one's 'real' self, to be warded otfby the devices
of asceticism, fi-om self-flagellation to celibacy. What should be matter-;
of enjoyment turn into 'a feeling ... of wretchedncss'. 1H Men fed 'split'
and, hke St Augustine, they plead !or chastity and continence - only 'not
yet'.
If I set myself off agaimt the world and my body then I also do so against my
fellow men. This sense of separation from others looms large at a number of
the stages of consciousness described by Hegel. His t1mous discussion of
'lordship and bondage' describes the manner in which people assert themselves,
though to no avail, by trying to enslave the freedom of others. And he criticizes
the societies of his own day for having become mere 'heaps' of human 'atoms',
held only by mutual self- interest. In such societies there is lacking any
ldentlhcatlon, 111 heart and soul, with one's community.
Philosophy and Alienation 29
There is another aspect of alienation which, Hegel thought, was particularly
visible in the century into which he was born. Indeed, he refers to the eight-
eenth-century Age of Enlightenment as 'the world of self-alienated spirit'. 19
Although no defender of the myths and superstitions which the Enlightenment
challenged, he did think that, in their crude way, these captured the important
truth that the world is replete with meaning. (One thinks here of the medieval
and Renaissance image of the world as the Book of God.) By treating the
world as a mere mechanism, and meaning or value as a purely 'subjective'
contribution, Voltaire and his friends made Nature a more rational, but also a
more foreign, place - one which only the scientist, in his cool moments, can
properly measure. Where the Gods of old had shown themselves in symbols for
man to read, the God of the Enlightenment was the distant 'Supreme Being', a
dock-maker with whom no one could feel an affinity. From this picture of the
world as a meaningless mechanism, it was a short step, Hegel believed, to the
nihilism of the French Revolution where society too became a mere mechan-
ism to be taken apart and reassembled at will.
Fourth, the alienating bifurcation between Mind and Nature can induce in
men a sense of being completely inessential to the way things are. This is part of
Hegel's point in the early chapters of the Phenomenology where he discusses
'perception' and 'understanding'. To conceive of ourselves as mere perceivers
of an objective reality is to deny that we have any responsibility for the
articulation of reality. While it is an advance if we also come to understand
the world in terms of causal laws, it remains that the world is not, in an
important sense, our world.
Finally, alienated man cannot be free. The two crucial features of Hegel's
complex theory of freedom are that a person is only free if he is not dependent
on anything outside of himself, and that 'a man is only free when he
knows himself[to be free].' 20 To be free, people must not only be independent
of anything standing over against them, but they must feel that they are
thus independent. The alienated person, however, feels that objects
'dominate' him, and that he is a 'victim' of his sensual, 'animal' desires.
Hence, the attempt to overcome alienation is one with the urge towards
freedom: 'the nature of Geist [is\ to alienate itself in order to find itself again.
This movement is just what freedom is ... By reverting to itself, Geist achieves
its freedom ... where everything foreign has vanished ... Geist is absolutely
free, at home with itself. ' 21
Alienated men, in sum, are doomed at some point to feel divorced from
their own bodies and from their fellows; and to regard the world, devoid of
meaning and value, as an order to which they are quite inessential, and in
which they cannot realize their freedom. It is these 'grim' aspects of the
alienated stance which, as well as its intellectual incoherence, drive men on
to overcome it.
 30 Philosophy and Alienation
Two points about Hegel remain outstanding, but these are best made during a
brief outline of Karl Marx's account of alienation.
In line with his famous dictum that philosophers must change the world,
Marx wrote that 'philosophy can only be realized by the abolition of the
22
proletariat' and vice versa. This is because the aim of philosophy, as for
Hegel, is to overcome alienation, and because this requires society to be rid
of economic class division. It is difficult to exaggerate the role played by
alienation in Marx's early writings. Neither the injustices of class society nor
the mevitability of its disappearance constitutes his case for communism, but
solely the belief that overcoming alienation requires the abolition of classes.
Originally, indeed, alienation is the cause, not the effect, of class
division, though the connection later becomes reciprocal. Against Hegel,
however, Marx believed that alienation, in turn, had an economic origin.
'How can it be that [men's) relationships become independent of them ...
[and] gain control over them? The answer in a word is - the division of
labour.' 23
The young Marx was led to these conclusions not only by reading Hegel,
but by reflecting on the contemporary state of religion, especially the issue of
Jewish emancipation in Germany. His crucial claim was that religion per se was
a symptom of alienation, in which case it was hopeless for Jews or anyone else
to seek emancipation through religious tolerance. All religion is an 'opium' to
wh1ch ahenated people turn for tranquillization. This is a radical extension of a
point of Hegel's, for while he was not, of course, an enemy of religion in
general, he was critical of those beliefs which conceive God as transcendent or
'outside' of the world. Such beliefs not only contribute to our sense of
alienation, as we saw in the case of the ascetic's 'unhappy consciousness', but
are also a product of that sense. An extra 'grim' aspect of alienation, therefore
is that it induces people, incapable of reconciling themselves to the real world:
to manufacture illusory ones. Marx goes beyond Hegel in regarding all reli-
giOns as so many illusions.
Marx further departs from Hegel in rejecting the whole metaphysics of Geist.
Alienation is not primarily a matter of misunderstanding the proper relation
between Mind and Nature: hence it cannot be overcome by a mere correction
of thought, by philosophy. Marx concedes that for Hegel alienation cannot be
ended purely cerebrally, and recognizes his insistence that men must also live in
the kind of political state described in The Philosophy of Right if they are to feel
'at home' in the world. But this, Marx thinks, is still not enough, for 'political
emancipation by itself cannot be human emancipation.' 24 Political life belongs
to society's 'superstructure', and not the economic 'substructure' where the
determinants of the human condition operate. The end of alienation therefore
demands transformation of 'existing social conditions' - private property, the
Philosophy and Alienation 31
division of labour - and not simply of the political forms which reflect these
conditions.
Marx exaggerates his distance from Hegel here, for he underplays the latter's
holism - the way in which everything in human affairs, being a manifestation of
Geist's latest development, hangs together. People will only philosophize truly,
and only constitute themselves into the Hegelian state, as part and parcel of a
total transformation of consciousness that affects, inter alia, their religion and art,
their family relations and their attitude towards work. (This great emphasis upon
holism is the second of the two points I left outstanding.) It remains, however,
that Hegel does not, in the manner ofMarx, envisage an economic revolution in
'existing social conditions' as required for ending human alienation.
It would take us too far from the concerns of this book to recount Marx's
analysis of alienation into its various modes- alienation from others, from one's
work and its products, and so on. It does need to be stressed, however, that the
'subjective' aspect of these modes- how things appear to people, how they are
felt - is just as important to Marx as the 'objective' economic circumstances.
People are alienated from their work because it is done under compulsion; but
also because they 'feel beside [themselves] in work', and 'at home' only away
from work, when performing their least human, 'animal fimctions'? 5 Marx,
then, is adding to the list of 'grim' experiences which motivate people to
overcome their alienation.
One of Marx's modes of alienation deserves special mention - what he calls
alienation from 'species-being' (or 'species-essence': German 'Gattungswesen').
This is a rich concept which underlies all the modes of alienation he cites, and
which provides a materialist twist to the Hegelian idea of Geist coming to grasp
the world as an extension of itself 'Species-being' is man's essence as a tree,
creative producer who co-operates with his fellows in lending form and
meaning to their world by transforming it through work. We 'humanize' the
world, not by thinking about it in the right way, but by making it into one
whose contents bear our stamp and reflect back to us our scale of values and
significance. (Faithful Marxists, with their picture of Nature as wax in man's
hands, are at the opposite pole from today's 'deep ecologists' .) 26 It is from this
'species-being' that we have, above all, become alienated. Instead of producing
freely and 'according to the laws of beauty', people produce out of need, and
'alienated labour ... makes [a man's]life-activity, his essence, a mere means for
his existence.' 27
Existentialism and Alienation
I am hardly the first to have suggested that issues of alienation are pivotal in
existentialist thought. William Barrett, for example, writes that 'alienation and
!
32 Philosophy and Alienation
estrangement' constitute the 'whole problematic' of existentialism: one which
'unfolds from the historical situation [of] bourgeois society in a state of
dissolution', notably 'the human debacle' of 1914-18. 28 My understanding,
however, is fundamentally at odds with Barrett's on two counts. First, the
Existentialist does not regard alienation as the product of recent historical
circumstance, like the 'dissolution' of bourgeois society. With Hegel, he
holds that millennia of Western thought have reinforced a tendency, implicit
in the very nature of consciousness, to posit an independent, 'objective' world.
Second, Barrett treats existentialism as a celebration, heroic or masochistic, of
alienated man's 'nakedness' and 'solitariness' before the world. Here, I suspect,
Camus' Sisyphus is exerting too much influence. The Existentialist in fact
follows Hegel and Marx in assigning to philosophy the task of curing people
of the misunderstandings which promote a sense of alienation.
This sense of alienation is to be overcome, not simply because it rests on
misunderstanding, but because it makes for an unhappy consciousness. Ex-
istentialists endorse the lists of 'grim' aspects of alienation drawn up by Hegel
and Marx. Marcel, for example, draws attention to the impossibility, once 'the
opposition between subject and object is treat[ed] as fundamental', of my
'getting back to the original consciousness' of 'incarnation', of being indis-
29
solubly 'bound to a body'. Sartre takes up the point that, in alienation, the
sense is lost that man is 'essential' to the constitution of the world, that he has a
'mission' to ensure that there is a structured reality at all. 30 Heidegger repeats
Hegel's observation that people have come to view the world as devoid of
significance, with values and meanings being stuck, as an afterthought, upon
the neutral world of which science speaks. Nietzsche, like Marx, attributes the
temptation to invent illusory realms, such as heaven, to the desire for
refuge from a world which is perceived as alien instead of something which
people bear the responsibility for 'creating'. 31
Despite the continuity with Hegel and Marx, the Existentialist follows
neither of them all the way in his diagnosis of alienation and his proposed
remed1es. He does not, for instance, share Marx's almost exclusive emphasis on
economic conditions and exploitation. These may reinforce people's sense of
living and working in a hostile world, but as Sartre succinctly puts it, 'alien-
32
ation precedes oppression.' The Existentialist is closer to Hegel in diagnosing
alienation as a 'spiritual' condition, but he does not embrace, nor perhaps
understand, Hegel's metaphysics of reality as self-bifurcating Geist. There is
no mind except that of individuals. Nor does he share Hegel's optimistic belief
that history is a long process, destined to be successful, of attempting to
overcome alienation. Indeed, the Existentialist is more impressed by what he
sees as the disingenuous ploys whereby people stave off the sense of alienation
which is implicit in their view of the world: their treatment of themselves as
merely natural objects, for example.
Philosophy and Alienation 33
This last remark introduces something crucial. The Existentialist's departures
from Hegel and Marx confront him with some serious questions which did not
arise for them. First, if Nature is not 'contained' in Mind, nor vice versa, how
· · ossible to avoid the dualist picture of conscious subjects confronting a
urtp . . . .
orld of independent objects? The question 1s particularly acute pven that, by
;efinition, existentialism emphasizes the unique, 'unthing-likc' character of
human existence.
The second, more complicated question concerns the relation between the
various modes of alienation identified by Hegel and Marx- alienation from the
world, from others and from oneself. Although Hcgel and Marx
between them, each holds that these modes hang together. In Hcgel s account,
alienation from the world is a form of self-alienation of Geist from itself. For
Marx, a person who is alienated from the world in which he works is ipso facto
estranged from his fellow workers and from his own 'species-essence'. For both
of them, alienation in each of its modes is overcome when people live together
in a certain kind of community - the Hegelian state, or the classless society.
The Existentialist, on the other hand, does not see the modes of alienation,
and their remedies, hanging together in these ways. On the contrary, he thinks
that, for the most part, people suppress a sense of alienation from the world by
becoming 'absorbed' in or 'tranquillized' by the comforting, ready-made
schemes of beliefs and values which prevail in their societies. This has two
implications. First, since this 'tranquillized' life is at odds with the exercise of
existential freedom, it is the life of people estranged from what is most
essentially their own, hence from themselves. Second, since an authentic
existence in which this freedom is exercised requires a person to disengage
himself from the ways of the 'Public', the 'herd' or the 'they', the remedy for
self-estrangement is inherently liable to bring him into conflict with his fellows.
There is a striking contrast between Hegel's belief that a person realizes his
freedom and human essence by becoming an 'accident' of a communal 'sub-
stance', the state, and Kierkegaard's conviction that the only way to 'become
33
an individual' is by withdrawal from, or opposition to, the 'Public'
The Existentialist therefore faces a difficulty which Hegel and Marx did not:
that of delineating forms of thought and existence in which people arc 'at
home' with their world and each other, but not at the cost of 'losing them-
selves'. He will succeed in his self-appointed philosophical task only if he brings
off this delicate manoeuvre.
Over the last few pages I have helped myself to some terminology from
Heidegger and others, but my description of the Existentialist's position on
issues of alienation does not match the way any particular existentialist writer
has put matters. It has been an example of what I called 'rational reconstruc-
tion': one which, I hope, many existentialists would accept as a way of
 Philosophy and Alienation 35
34 Philosophy and Alienation
40
sciences, or the advocacy of 'world-views'. Let me explain why I do not find
articulating an important motif in their work. Whether it is acceptable and
illuminating must be judged on the basis of the book as a whole, but it would any of this disturbing for my reconstruction ..
There is no doubt, first of all, that the mam targets of the early chapters of
be encouraging to have some reason in advance for thinking that the recon-
Beirtg and Time are precisely those dualisms of thought in which the Existen-
struction is not fantasy. So I shall consider, very briefly, how it fares in the cases
tialist locates the source of a sense of alienation from the world. They include
of two of our writers- an easy and a hard case.
those of subject versus object, mind versus body, and fact versus value. Nor is
The 'easy' case is that of Martin Buber, whose I and Thou is saturated in the
there any doubt that, like the Existentialist and like Buber, Hcidegger recogn-
vocabulary of alienation. The person who regards the world as an 'It' lives in
izes a proneness to dualistic thinking in the intrinsic nature of human experi-
'severance and alienation', and is without a 'home, a dwelling in the uni-
verse'.34 The philosopher's task is to return men to that relationship to the ence, in its so-called 'intentionality'.
Second, we should attend to Heidegger's later writings, where a constant
world, God and others which, 'split asunder', has polarized into 'I' versus 'It'.
theme is our 'estrangement from Being'. Especially in the writings on techno-
This proper relationship is that of 'I-Thou', Buber's metaphor for the condi-
logy, the vocabulary of alienation becomes pervasive. Man is described, time
tion in which men are not estranged. It is a common mistake to suppose that
and again, as 'homeless' and in search of a true 'dwelling'. Endorsing the words
Buber's 'Thou' refers only to persons and to God. In fact, anything- a tree, for
of Rilke, Heidegger writes that 'man stands over against the world. He does
example, or the eyes of a cat- can belong in the 'Thou', just as anyone can be 41
not live immediately in the drift and wind of the whole draught.' Now it is
an 'It' for us. Something figures as 'It' when, for example, it is considered solely
made clear in these writings that his concern tor 'homelessness' is not new. It
as an object of perception, possessed of properties deemed to exist indepen-
is simply that in the earlier writings this 'homelessness' was taken for granted
dently of ourselves. It is 'Thou' when it 'has to do with me', in the dual sense
and the emphasis placed instead on the generally inauthentic responses people
that I am essential to its being and it is to mine. 'A subject deprived of its object
make to its incipient threat: notably their willingiless to become 'absorbed' and
IS depnved of Its reality. ' 35
'tranquillized' in the ways of the 'they'. This was why, when the word
The features which characterize the 'I - It' relation, moreover, map the
'alienation' did occur, it was in the sense of self-estrangement.
'grim' aspects of alienation adumbrated by the Existentialist. For instance, the
In the later writings, finally, the task of philosphy is very much to 'rescue' us
world as 'It' has 'become adverse to meaning', and one in which we cannot
from our estrangement from Being. (To be precise, this is the task of'thinking',
view ourselves as free. Within it, social life becomes a 'collection of human
Heidegger having discarded the word 'philosophy' as hopelessly contaminated
units that do not know relation'?' Despite the Hegelian tone of some of his
with dualist metaphysics.) This sounds at odds with the earlier, 'pure' concep-
remarks, Buber is not a philosophical idealist. To suppose that 'there really is no
tion of philosophy as the study of Being as such. In fact, however, Being m1d
world at all' is an 'illusory' way to 'put [oneselfj at ease'. 37 Nor is he sym-
Time never gets beyond what, for Heidegger, is supposed to be a preparatory
pathetiC to Hegel's political remedies. It would be to 'see man only as a part' to
stage: examination of how human beings understand and misunderstand the
that he could be saved from 'cosmic and social homelessness' by
Being which is an 'issue· for them. Two points about this examination should
becommg so mtegrated in a community as to be a mere ·accident' of
be noted. First, an expose of people's misunderstandings about Being - notably
Finally, Buber shares the Existentialist's view that a tendency to regard the
their tendency to equate it with the spatia-temporal universe investigated by
world as alien, as 'It', is implicit in the very nature of consciousness: a tendency
scientists- is ipso facto a therapeutic critique of their attitudes and practices. This
aided and abetted by dualistic metaphysics. It belongs, he says, in the nature ;f
is because people's 'understanding of Being and [their] comportment to beings
experience to minimize the contribution made by the one who is experiencing 42
do not come together only afterward and by chance' . Second, most of Bring
to the constitution of the object experienced. This encourages people to 'split'
and Time has only the remotest connection with the stated goal of a study of
expenence, w;ongly, into two independent factors: a 'ghostly I' and a 'ready-
Being as such. Much of it consists of earthy discussions of the practices and
made world'. 3J
ploys, the desires and deceptions of those particular beings, ourselves, who for
The 'hard' case is Heidegger, whose writings during the Being and Time
the most part arc at odds with either the world, each other, or themselves.
penod contain hardly any explicit discussion of alienation. He does occasion-
I suggest, then, that it may be illuminating to read the works of the Being and
ally use the term, but always in the sense of self-estrangement, not estrange-
Time period in the light of the Existentialist's concern with issues of alienation;
ment from the world. Nor, it seems, does he think of philosophy as having a
and that Heideggcr himself, to judge from later remarks, came to read them in
practical task, but only the very 'pure' task of investigating Being. This is not to
this light as well.
be contammated by either the study of particular beings, which is the job of the
 --
36 Philosophy and Alienation Philosophy and Alienation 37

Most readers would be disappointed to be told that existentialism is in no George Berkeley, Philosophical Writings, 1952, p. 167.
6
Quoted from Berkeley's Alciphrotz by John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Natrm,
manner a 'practical' philosophy, one to be 'lived'. Fortunately this is not what I 7
am saying, even though existentialism's relevance to life has often been dis- 1980, P· 15.
Quoted by Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 1963, vol. 2, p. 382.
torted. For example, its message is certainly not that we should prowl about 8
9 Meyer Schapiro, Van Gogh, n.d. p. 34.
committing acres J!Yatllits as we wallow in a defiant mood of despair. lt may well G. w. F. Hegel, Introductio\n to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1985, p. 80.
10
be that the Existentialist can oHer us something by way of concrete guidance to None of the usual translatidhs of' Geist' is adequate, so I leave it in German.
attitudes and actions. That is something to consider later. In this chapter I have 11 Ibid., p. 42.
indicated a prior, if more modest, sense in which existentialism bears upon life. 12 Hegel, 71ze Philosophy of History, 1956, p. 72; The History of Philosophy, p. 42.
In the first instance, it addresses a number of dualistic illusions to which we arc 13 Hegel, The History of Philosophy, pp. 25-6, 42.
prone. As for the Daoist and the Wittgcnsteinian, for Hegcl. Goethe and Marx, 14 Hegel, Tile Philosophy of Mitzd, 1969, p. 2.
so for the Existentialist these arc not merely intellectual errors which love of 15 The History cif Philosophy, pp. 22, 176.
truth alone obliges one to dispel. They arc illusions which 'bewitch' us and 16 Hegel, TI1e Philosophy cif Mind, p. 3.
17 The Philosophy of History, p. 26.
pervade our lives; illusions which generate a sense of being 'homelessly'
18 Hegel, Phenommology of Spirit, 1977, p. 135.
abandoned in a world devoid of meaning and value, a world whose 'unim-
19 Ibid., pp. 294fT.
aginable otherness' is, at best, partly accessible only to the man in the laborat-
20 The History cif Philosophy, p. 76.
ory. Dissolution of these dualisms is not a victory, therefore, for right thinking
21 Ibid.
alone. It can transform the view we take on our position in the order of things, 22 'Contribution to the critique of Hegel's Philosophy cif Right', in The Portable Karl
and tree us for a new comportment towards our world. Marx, ed. E. Kamenka, 1983, p. 124.
There are, however, many ways and many philosophies through which it is 23 Note to Part 1 of Marx's The German Ideology, quoted by L. Kolakowski, Main
possible for people to view themselves as 'at home' in the world. Several of Currents of Marxism, 1981, vol. 1, pp. 172-3.
these can be accepted and followed only at the expense of a proper under- 24 'On the Jewish question', in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Kamenka, P· 105.
standing oC and fidelity to, the distinctive character of individual human 25 Economico-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in ibid. pp. 136-7.
26 See John Passmore, Man's Responsibility for Nature, 1980, pp. 24tf.
existence. (The Existentialist would include here the philosophies of Hegt'l
27 Economico-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in The Portable Kart Marx, ed. Kamenka,
and Marx, and various other brands of idealism and materialism.) Existentialism
p. 139.
is not to work for people like a drug, to pro,·ide a means of'coping' with one's
28 Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, 1960, PP· 29ff.
situation which only people in bad taith could swallow. If existentialism is a 29 BeitJg and Hauing, 1949, pp. 11-12.
philosophy to live, it is to be lived by men ;md \V omen who have not become 30 Cahiers pour une morale, 1983, p. 514.
estranged from themselves. 31 See, for instance, The Will to Power, 1968, section 585.
The issue of alienation will not return in any detail until chapter 5. Before 32 Cahiers pour um• morale, p. 485.
that we need to appreciate the Existentialist's understanding of the world. 33 Hegel, 771e Philosophy cif History; Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 1962.
human existence and the relation between the two, as articulated in his 34 Buber, I and 77wu, 1937, pp. 58, 115.
existential phenomenolob'Y. 35 Ibid., pp. 8, 90.
36 Ibid., pp. 57-8, 107.
37 Ibid., pp. 71-2.
38 Quoted from Buber's Das Problem des Menschetz by Paul Roubiczek, Existentialism -
Notes
For and Against, 1964, p. 151.
39 Buber, I and 77zou, pp. 21, 26.
Ludwig Wittgcnstcin, Philosophical Inucstigarions, 1'169, pp. 47, 49, 103. 40 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 178H, for instance.
2 Chuang-Tzu, in Wisdom of the Daoist .Hastcrs, 191'4, eh. 2. 41 'What are poets for?', in Poetry, Language, Thought, 1971, p. 108.
3 A similar point is made by John McDowell in his excellent paper, 'Singular 42 Heidegger, The Basic Problems Phenommology, 1982, p. 327.
thought and the extent of inner space·, 19k6.
4 Rcnc Descartcs, Plzi/osop!tical Letters, 1970, p. 46.
5 77Je Republic, 19k6, p. 2fl4.